Alongside the date came statistics for the recently finished beta. Apparently more than 2.7 million people took part, logging 16m hours and 1.1bn virtual kills.

"It's exceeded our expectations," Bungie's Brian Jarrard commented.

"Our only real perspective going into this was the Halo 3 beta test, which had about 800,000 people. We knew there were a couple million copies of ODST out there, but we really didn't have any specific information that let us know what the population might be like."